Airtel Africa Plc

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Airtel Africa results for the year ended 31 March 2026. All participants will be in listen only mode. There will be an opportunity to ask questions later during the call. If you should need assistance during the call, please signal an operator by pressing star and then zero. Please note that this event is being recorded. I'll now hand the conference over to Sunil Tolar. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. And a very good afternoon. Good morning to all. And thank you once again for joining the call today. I have with me Kamal Dua, our CFO and Alistair, Head of Investor Relations. Let me give you some brief highlights over the last year before running through our strategic and operational achievements and how this has translated into a strong set of results that we have reported today. After that, I will hand over to Kamal to run through the financials. Over the last year, our performance has been supported by a much more stable macroeconomic and currency environment. This has been very welcome development and has allowed us to clearly demonstrate the growth opportunity across the region and how the deployment of a strategy has enabled us to capture a strong share of this opportunity. While this improved backdrop is supportive, it remains critical that we continue to sharpen our strategic focus to ensure the business remains resilient, but also that we continue to offer an attractive customer proposition. Against this backdrop, we have delivered strong momentum across both the operational and financial performance. This resulted in very strong constant currency revenue growth of 24% for the year and almost 30% in reported currencies. as currencies appreciated in a number of markets. This strong revenue performance combined with continued cost efficiency success translated into a 49.3% EBITDA margin with an all-time high margin of 50.3% in quarter four. This performance would not have been possible without our continued focus on disciplined capex investment We delivered CapEx in line with our guidance and given the scale of the opportunity, we will continue to invest at an elevated level to future-proof our business. Finally, the strong operating performance has translated into strong free cash flow generation, further strengthening the group's capital structure and enabling the board to declare a further 9.2% increase in the dividends. We are transforming millions of lives across Africa by delivering essential telecom and financial services. This slide serves to highlight the key components of our performance over the last year, reflecting how we have executed against the opportunity on offer across our markets. Firstly, the scale of our business is reflected in the 183.5 million customers we now serve across our footprint. An increase of over 10%, smartphone penetration continues to rise, reaching 49.5% as digital inclusion becomes more widespread. Secondly, our ambition to drive financial inclusion is clearly evident in the 21% growth in the mobile money customers, which reached 54.1 million. that growth together with continually evolving ecosystem has been a key driver of annualized transaction value of 215 billion dollars up almost 50 year-on-year this operating performance has been the foundation of a strong financial performance which i reflected on the previous slide importantly our capital structure remains strong which gives us the flexibility to continue to invest across our network with these adjusted leverage down to 0.5 times, we are in a strong position to accelerate network investments while also enabling shareholder returns. This slide brings together what has been an exceptional year for the business, delivering three important milestones, all of which reflect significant achievements. Firstly, reflecting on the strong demand across our markets, and our ability to capture a higher share of the opportunity, we saw customer net additions reach 17.5 million. Secondly, we delivered very strong revenue growth underpinned by strong momentum across both our telecom and mobile money business. And thirdly, our EBITDA margins increased 280 basis points to 49.3%, demonstrating our ability to translate that growth into improved profitability and reflecting continued success in our cost optimization program. These outcomes are clearly supported by favorable industry fundamentals, including growing data demand and increasing digital adoption across our markets. However, just as importantly, they reflect the disciplined execution of our strategy, Our focus on network investment, customer experience, digital inclusion and cost efficiency is delivering tangible results, and we are seeing consistent benefits across both the top and bottom line. Taken together, this performance highlights not just the scale of the opportunity ahead of us, but also the capability of the organization to execute effectively and deliver sustainable growth since our listing in 2019. Let me now spend a few minutes explaining the significant opportunities across our markets and how our strategy will enable us to continue executing on this opportunity. Many of you will recognize this slide, which sets out the key elements of our strategy. Our approach is designed to ensure we continue to address the significant opportunities across our 14 markets while delivering sustainable and profitable growth that creates value for all our stakeholders. The six strategic pillars focus our investment and the expertise of our talented people on the core activities that will unlock this opportunity. This is supported by a continued emphasis on cost optimization, progress against our sustainability objectives, and ongoing investment in developing our people. At the center of our strategy are our customers. Our success is driven by offering them a great experience, which is why everything we do is designed with the customer firmly in mind. Slide 8 brings together the key strategic achievements from the year and importantly shows how they align directly with the strategy. I outlined in the previous slide. While every achievement on the slide matters, I would highlight two areas where we have been particularly focused. The first is delivering a brilliant network experience for our customers. During the year, we increased CapEx investments by over 30%, reflecting our continued commitment to network quality, coverage, and capacity. Alongside this, we have also been very active on partnerships In particular, our innovative partnership with Starlink is expected to further enhance coverage, especially in areas where our terrestrial network is not yet rolled out, helping us to extend reach and improve service resilience. The second area of focus has been future-proofing the business to support sustained growth. This includes actively investing in new growth opportunities, such as home broadband and data centers. These adjacencies leverage our own infrastructure and capabilities and position as well to meet evolving customer needs over the medium term. These initiatives reflect both a clear strategic focus and strong execution, and they have played an important role in delivering the achievements I highlighted earlier. Slide nine gives a good overview of how we are using AI and technology across the business to support our strategic priorities. particularly with regards to customer experience, security enhancing growth, security enhancing growth, and driving efficiencies. At a high level, digitization is helping us both enhance the customer proposition and simplify the customer journeys. We're using digital tools and data insights to better understand customer behavior, personalize offerings, and improve how customers interact with us, making experiences more intuitive and more relevant. From a network perspective, we are increasingly deploying advanced analytics to inform where and how we invest. These network analytics combined with on-the-ground insights help us prioritize site deployment and optimize performance, ultimately supporting coverage, quality, and growth. We are also applying technology to drive greater efficiency across the business. In particular, AI-enabled network optimization tools are helping us reduce energy consumption and manage our energy costs more effectively, which supports both margins and our sustainability objectives. Taken together, these initiatives illustrate how digital capabilities are becoming an integral part of how we operate, improving customer experience, strengthening the network and driving efficiency, while remaining firmly aligned with our broader strategy. The growth framework on this chart depicts how our operational success has been achieved and also explains how we intend to sustain strong growth momentum going forward. The growth in the customer base across all segments, combined with increased ARPU, as increased usage is monetized, translates into strong revenue growth. Operational leverage and cost optimization drives increased resources for investment to reinforce future growth, therefore enabling continued customer base growth. This virtuous cycle will continue to sustain our growth operating momentum in the future. As a group, we need to be very clear in how we aim to capture this growth, and our consistent focus on our strategy has helped unlock this growth, and we remain optimistic on the future outlook. Let me now spend a few minutes talking about each of the business segments and the regional performance. Firstly, the mobile services business Despite the business growing by 18.5% CAGR over the last five years, this chart highlights why we still remain positive on the growth outlook. At a high level, we operate across a population of around 680 million people. And importantly, the demographics across our markets are highly attractive. The median age is under 20 years, compared with over 42 in developed markets. This highlights the scale of the future customer base coming through our markets and supports our confidence in the long-term outlook. This favorable demographic profile combined with still relatively low smartphone penetration continues to underpin strong growth in data customers. It also supports increasing data usage as both new and existing customers increasingly adopt a wider range of data and digital services, often for the first time. This slide is a snapshot of the growth we have achieved in the mobile services business over the last few years. Providing enhanced coverage and capacity and our investment into the distribution network is all fundamental to being able to provide a customer experience that will not only maintain loyalty, but also attract new customers to our network. This is all supported by the initiatives we have spoken about. around digital innovation and simplifying the customer journey, driving accelerated data customer growth. During the period, we saw data traffic increase by almost 50% as usage per customer continues to rise to nine GB per month. The sustained data demand story has supported the 35% growth in data revenue, which has now become the biggest component of revenue for the group underpinning the future growth trajectory. For mobile money, the growth opportunity is again very compelling. Many of you will be aware of the low levels of financial inclusion across our markets, with only 35 to 40% of adults owning a bank account, compared to over 90% in more developed markets. Furthermore, as business scales and as we continue to enhance the ecosystem offering, we will see increased engagement on platform driving increased transaction value. Importantly, only around 30% of our customers are currently actively using the mobile money services, showcasing the amount of growth runway left as we continue to drive financial inclusion across our base. What I mentioned in the previous slide is clearly playing out in terms of our operating and financial performance. The opportunity, the distribution reach, and a scalable customer-centric platform gives us the ability to offer a range of different services, which is heavily supported by deep-rooted partnerships, which can unlock new growth opportunities and drive the business to new levels. This combined with continued innovation and the rollout of digital offerings has seen an accelerating uptake in customers. with annualized transaction value in quarter four over $215 billion and ARPUs up 9% in constant currency terms. The result has been a strong 28% growth in revenues, which has once again been sustained over a number of years, indicative of the opportunity this business holds. Existing for the intra-group agreements, which have been revised, the growth would have come in about 31%. Let me briefly touch on how our mobile money business has evolved and is likely to continue evolving in future years. Our business mix has evolved meaningfully as we continue to innovate and introduce products that have been rapidly adopted by our highly engaged customer base. This is particularly evident in payments and transfers, which now account for 42% of revenues, up from 35% five years ago, and have delivered a five-year CAGR of 34%. We are also encouraged by the progress in our financial services segment, which reflects more recent innovations across areas such as bank-to-wallet, lending, savings, wealth, and insurance. This segment has grown at a five-year CAGR of 55% with growth of 61% in constant currency over the last year. Overall, this mixed shift reflects maturing customer cohorts adopting a broader range of use cases and supports a continued evolution towards a more diversified, resilient ecosystem with higher monetization per user. Let me now briefly run through the regional performance, which includes both mobile money and mobile services. We've continued to see strong operating momentum in Nigeria, with customers increasing around 10% and ARPUs growing by almost 37% in constant currency terms. We are very encouraged by the macro stability that has returned to the Nigerian market, which has enabled us to report these strong trends. While the tariff adjustments approved by the regulator have certainly benefited our performance, we have seen sustained usage growth, particularly in data, drive a strong constant currency revenue growth performance of 47.5% in the period. EBITDA margins have increased by almost 8 percentage points as the strong revenues, improved macro, stable diesel prices, and execution of our cost efficiency measures have taken hold, translating into a 70.5% growth in EBITDA in constant currency. In East Africa, our largest region, trends remain strong with constant currency revenue growth of around 18% despite the high base. What we have also witnessed in the region is some appreciating currencies, which resulted in reported currency growth of 24% for the region. Once again, the strong subscriber growth and increased usage of our services, which has driven rising ARPUs, has been the foundation of this strong growth, with EBITDA margins rising to over 53% in the period. And finally, in the francophone region, performance has remained strong despite the stronger comparables. We have been seeing a clear turnaround in the performance in the region driven by consistent focus on driving base level growth through the relentless focus on our strategy. This combined with increased adoption of services has contributed to an ARPU increase, strong revenue growth of 17.1% in constant currency and EBITDA margins rising to 44%. Currencies also benefited from an appreciation, resulting in reported currency revenue growth of 21.5%. Before handing over to Kamal, let me briefly touch on the opportunity in enterprise and home broadband and what we are doing to capture this. Starting with home broadband, penetration across our markets remains very low at around 2%, which provides a clear and long-term runway for growth. Importantly, this is not just a theoretical opportunity. There are more than 30 million households across our footprint that can afford a broadband connection, and our innovative home broadband offerings are resonating strongly with customers. Turning to enterprise, the opportunity is equally attractive. During the year, we continue to build out data center capacity at scale in Nigeria, Kenya, and DRC, given the structural growth opportunity across our markets. Furthermore, the rollout of fiber to almost 82,000 kilometers provides the resilient, high-capacity connectivity that enterprise customers increasingly require, supporting machine-critical applications, improved reliability, and secure access to global networks. Overall, these opportunities play directly to our strengths, leverage our existing infrastructure and capabilities, and reinforce our confidence in the long-term growth potential across both segments. Hopefully, this clearly summarizes our position across the market and reflects the performance we have achieved over the period. Importantly, we believe in our strategy and the execution of the strategy is integral to capturing these opportunities. Let me now hand over to Kamal to run through the financials.

Thank you, Sunil. Good morning. A very good afternoon to all of you. I'll start with the key financial highlight. Overall, we have seen a very strong year's performance in revenue growth and EBITDA margin, which was also supported by a relatively favorable macroeconomic in most of our markets. Revenue for the year cost $6.4 billion, which are grown by 29.5% in the reported currency and 24% in the constant currency. The reported currency growth has been benefited from the currency appreciation in most of our markets, but the strong growth in constant currency reflects our continued strategic success as outlined by Sunil in the earlier part of the presentation. For the quarter ended March, the constant currency revenue growth of 22.3% was lower as compared to the prior quarter as we partially lapped the Nigeria tariff benefit during the quarter. EBITDA at $3.16 billion in the reported currency grew by 37.2% during the year. EBITDA margin at 49.3% improved 280 basis point in the reported currency as a result of continued operating momentum sustained benefit from our ongoing cost efficiency program, and a relatively stable macroeconomic environment. EBITDA margin peaked at 50.3% in Q4, which was an increase from 47.3% in the prior period. The business generated $803 million of pre-cash flow during the year, which is nearly four times higher than the prior period. The strong performance was achieved despite delivering on the increased CapEx guidance, which was communicated in the H1 results. The least adjusted leverage at 0.5 times improved from 1 time, largely due to higher EBITDA. Similarly, our reported leverage at 1.8 times improved from 2.3 times. The result of the strong growth, strong macroeconomic backdrop, and continued focus on our cost helped deliver a 128% increase in EPS before exceptional to 18.6 cents now. The board has recommended a final dividend of 4.26 cents per share, which is up 9.2% versus last year, in line with our current dividend policy. This combined with the interim dividend of 2.84 cents per share makes a total of 7.1 cent dividend for the full year. The next slide run through the top line development. In the constant currency terms, the revenue growth of 24% was supported by the strong trend across all our business segments, We continue to see double-digit growth in voice revenue, while data revenue, which is now the largest contributor to the group revenue, increased by 35.2%, as we have continued to see strong smartphone adoption across all our markets. In our mobile money segment, the business remains supported by the continued focus on the expansion of our ecosystem, with customer addition and ARPU driving growth of over 28% for the year. In reported currency, the growth rate came in at the premium to the constant currency in mobile money as well, which reflects the currency appreciation we saw across all our markets during the year. Now, coming to the EBITDA margin slides, during the year, we have been relentlessly focused on our cost optimization program. We have actively taken steps to reduce our costs without impacting our strong growth trajectory. This program, alongside continued operational leverage and a more stable macroeconomic environment, has helped us deliver a very strong EBITDA margin of 49.3%, which peaked at 50.3% in Q4. A margin increased by 280 basis points and 240 basis points respectively. Consolidated EBITDA came at $3.16 billion in absolute, an increase of 37.2% in reported currency and 30.4% in the constant currency. Our finance cost, which reflects the key component of finance cost movement from the last year. There are two key takeaways that are worth noting in this slide. The first one is related to an increase in our lease interest. We saw $148 million increase over the last year as we continue to increase our site rollout. Furthermore, the full year impact over the tar contract renewal that took place in the prior year impacted lease interest by $86 million. The second is our success in our ability to lower the cost of our debt. The average cost of our debt declined by 60 basis points to 12.1% for the full year. Importantly, as at the end of March 2026, the average cost of our debt has declined to 10.6%, which reflects our ongoing focus on optimizing our portfolio of the debt, while also benefiting from the lower interest rate alignment. With regard to the losses of forex, in the prior period, we have $179 million of derivative and forex exchange losses. Whereas in the current year, we reported foreign exchange gains of $127 million given the currency appreciation in many of our markets. Moving to the EPS slide, our EPS before the exceptional item was up 128% to 18.6 US cents in the current period as compared to 8.2 cents in the prior period. The increase in EPS clearly reflects the success we have talked about it over the year, with revenue and EBITDA trends remain very strong, which drove a very strong performance in the operating profits. If we were to exclude the impact of forex devaluation in the prior period and the gains in the current period, the EPS has increased from 9.8 cents to 16.2 cents, again reflecting the strong underlying performance of our business. For the normalized free cash flow, the business generated a free cash flow of $803 million in the current year as compared to $213 million in the prior period, which is an almost fourfold increase. This slide gives us a bridge between EBITDA and the normalized free cash flow for the current year. The biggest components of the cash flows below EBITDA relates to the cash capex of $875 million and interest payment of $816 million. We have discussed the increased interest costs earlier in the presentation. Our CAPEX payments are largely in line with our balance sheet CAPEX as we stepped up our investment over the year, which reflected our increased optimism around the business outlook. CAPEX came in line with our increased guidance, which we provided at the H1 result, as we accelerate our ability to capitalize on the significant opportunity across our markets. Now let me discuss our CAPEX outlook for the next year. As you can see from the slide number 29, we increased CapEx in FY26 to $884 million, with a particular increase in CapEx intensity in the second half of the year. Given the opportunity and the initial success we have seen today, we have provided CapEx guidance in FY27 of $1.1 billion, reflecting our confidence in an underlying demand and our ability to create long-term value for our shareholders. Our investment will be focused on three priorities. The first one is on the coverage, where we are increasing our site rollout and expanding into underserved rural markets. It is critical to drive deeper SIM penetration, extend 4G coverage across our footprint, and advance our digital inclusion agenda. Second, enhancing our capacities on data. Our data demand continues to grow at a rapid pace. We are selectively rolling it out on our 5G network, modernizing our network to unlock additional capacities, and expanding our fiber to strengthen transmission and improve network resilience. Third are the new growth engines, where we are seeing a very big opportunity. We are seeing strong traction in our home broadband business, and so we'll begin scaling both wireless and the wirelines, which will be supported by 5G, to enhance our HPV proposition. In parallel, our data center investment will also accelerate during the next financial year, as the construction across our key markets are gathering momentum. Overall, these focused investments are designed to strengthen our market position, support discipline growth, and maximize long-term value creation, while remaining fully aligned with our strong cash flow generation and following our capital allocation framework. Now, I'll move to our capital structure slide. During the year, we have continued to focus on strengthening our balance sheet. Two extremely critical points to highlight from this slide are The first one is reducing our foreign currency debt exposure across our business. Old co-debt remains at zero with 95% of our off-co-debt being in now local currency, an increase from 93% last year. Secondly, leverage. The group leverage of 1.8 times has improved from 2.3 times compared to the prior period, primarily as a result of increase in beta. Our lease adjusted leverage, our key financial metrics has also improved from 1 times to 0.5 times. This strong balance sheet position remains a key policy for our business and provides us the flexibility to increase our investment strategy all within our capital allocation policy. Our capital allocation policy remains aligned to our previous period. Our capital allocation policy remains aligned to the prior period. Our key priorities remain to continuously invest in the business, strengthening our balance sheet and return cash to our shareholders. Our first priority is to invest in the business and increase CAPEX spend in 2026 and the CAPEX guidance for 2027 reflects we remain focused on this as an priority. The second pillar of our capital allocation policy is to ensure a sustainable capital structure. With leverage having fallen to 0.5x and a low level of dollar debt in our balance sheet, I am extremely pleased with the state of our current capital structure. Finally, the third pillar is all about returning the cash to shareholders through our progressive dividend policy. This policy has been extremely consistent over the years and is again reflected in the board decision to pay a final dividend of 4.26 cents per share, growing 9.2%, which remains at the top end of our dividend policy, which aims to grow the dividend by mid to high single digits. Shareholder returns have also been complemented by the $100 million share buyback program, which was completed during the year. In summary, our capital allocation priorities remain clear. Continue to invest to strengthen our competitive position, maintain a strong and resilient balance sheet, and returning cash to our shareholders, all underpinned by the strong cash generation and the disciplined execution. Let me now hand over the call to Cyril for his concluding remarks.